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Only he is right, you are 1 person of 5, and this romantic notion that if you are a good player you can win despite there being 4 totally ineffectual people in your team is absurd.

Individual matches are totally different to statistics. Statistically if your performance is consistently good your chance to win matches goes up and so does your MMR. But on individual cases welp, you are pretty much at the mercy of the matchmaker unless you are WAY WAY better than your opponent.

The corollary to this is that the closer your performance is to your current ranking, the more matches you will need to stabilize on your performance level. Or in plain English, unless you are secretly diamond it takes a shit ton of matches for your performance to make a difference.

It's like poker. If youre a good player despite the hands you get dealt you still consistently play better than your opponents.

Individual skill means more than just the cards youre dealt (teammates) it means leveraging your advantages and enforcing their errors.

So no it's not absurd. Your opponents are in the same boat as you. Find a weakness and exploit it.

That analogy does not work, if you get bad cards in poker you can bluff. If you are behind in LoL you can "bluff" warding a lot and using intelligent and coordinated strategies...which does not work if one of your cards throws a hissy fit and afk's at fountain and other card keeps getting caught even when, thanks to your warding, it knows exactly where the enemy cards are because cards don't understand the concept of good, society, love or mini map.

-You are an excellent support who places wards in excellent positions, all excellently.

-When paired when teammates that know how to use that vision, your chances of winning will go up.

-When paired with teammates who get caught despite your warding, your excellent warding is useless. When you have one afk and one complete troll, your team is not going to take advantage of your vision anyway.

So:

-Your excellent warding is going to make you win more games than if your warding was awful. So if you ward better your MMR will go up.

-However, some games this is going to be a non-factor because your teammates will not be in position to take advantage of said warding.

CONCLUSION: Even though warding excellently will, on the long run, make your MMR go higher, it does not mean that every game you lose is your fault somehow for not warding hard enough.

Well, it's RNG when you can't provide any advantages. As you get better you weigh the dice in your favor, but you still can get bad rolls. There are external factors that diminish in importance as the skill gap increases between you and your opponents, that's why skilled players say LoL is just a matter of being one with the LoL verse and then you can win EVERY SINGLE MATCH, bronzies that don't understand the system complain about "ELO Hell" and people in between understand that improving is important but feel frustrated sometimes because the matchmaker throws something horrible at you. In these last cases saying "you are not carrying hard enough" doesn't help, explaining the system and how every single thing you improve on means a huge change in the overall outcome after a lot of matches, some of which will be unwinnable but that's normal is way more helpful and not totally disconnected from reality.

It's just that turning every loss in a session of self-flagellation is not going to make someone who is frustrated any less frustrated.

Stay positive, you just had a string of bad luck. As you said, you won 5/6 games before this. Focus on what you can change (increase map awareness, direct teammates) instead of what you can't (AFK/Feeders/Rage Quit). Just enjoy the ride and try out different champs/roles. Have you tried our very own forum approved sure-win Janna build yet?

You're absolutely right, i was kidding myself thinking my mental state was good enough for 2 more games last evening. What is the forum approved janna build? I've played her a few times and even though i'm not great at her, she somehow manages to win games...

"Look out here comes"..."Susan"..."Suuuuuuuuuuuuusan".
"Woah, I just scared myself!"

I'll say this - in Bronze play someone that can carry and try to avoid support unless you have a competent AD. I'm an incompetent AD and I still carried games in Bronze.

Supporting's a pretty decent position to carry from in Bronze as long as you realise that it's a very different game to supporting in other tiers. Much more emphasis on kill lanes, far less emphasis on vision wars, and you can feasibly wind up with the most money on your team because nobody can CS well.

As long as you take a support that scales well and puts out a lot of damage late game (i.e., none of the traditional supports) then you're good to go.

I think a lot of it is that i play jungle, love the jungle and feel strong about my jungle play. But games can be won or lost if you're mid or adc are overly strong. See WildTurtle for how much of an easier time you'll have powering through League if you are that dominant at a skill position.

I feel like the mid/adc are the WRs and RBs to use football terms. The top lane is your TE. And the jungler is your QB. I can make throws or throw the game but like Gisele once said about Brady. He can't throw and catch the ball too! But you get someone like Adrian Peterson, or Calvin Johnson...yeah they can "carry" the game. Guess thats why they're called carries...

"Look out here comes"..."Susan"..."Suuuuuuuuuuuuusan".
"Woah, I just scared myself!"

I think a lot of it is that i play jungle, love the jungle and feel strong about my jungle play. But games can be won or lost if you're mid or adc are overly strong. See WildTurtle for how much of an easier time you'll have powering through League if you are that dominant at a skill position.

I feel like the mid/adc are the WRs and RBs to use football terms. The top lane is your TE. And the jungler is your QB. I can make throws or throw the game but like Gisele once said about Brady. He can't throw and catch the ball too! But you get someone like Adrian Peterson, or Calvin Johnson...yeah they can "carry" the game. Guess thats why they're called carries...

In this analogy I imagine the support is the kicker. They have a huge impact on win/loss but they get no respect in the locker room...

Jungle can be hard to carry from if the other jungler is competent, because your skill doesn't necessarily gimp the others farm potential outright like bullying people out of lane does. Junglers are force amplifiers, but it's hard if there's nothing to amplify.

People who use the "I'm only 1/5th of the team" argument are forgetting one very important thing. You will only have a ~50% win/loss over the long term if you are where you belong.

There's a reason diamond players get their smurfs to diamond in 50 games. Because even against like gold players, those players could play almost any champ and get 20 kills and single handedly carry the game.

If you go on a stretch of a bad 10 games because you had afks, people feeding uncontrollably on your team or whatever, that's fine. But just track your personal performance in 100+ games, and you'll find that if you are not above where you started at the beginning of that 100 games, it's because YOU earned it.

I can speak from experience on this. I have about 500 ranked games in season 3, and the highest i've been is Silver 1. Right now I'm Silver 1 like 80 LP, though I haven't played ranked in about a week and a half. The thing is, the only thing keeping me in silver all this time is me. My most played champ this season only has 21 games played, and I have a losing record with him. Basically, I've not done the things that are necessary to climb faster.

However, over the past couple months I have improved my mechanics, my awareness, and probably most importantly, my attitude. The only reason I'm potentially going to get my gold promo this month is that I treat EVERY game as 100% my responsibility, no matter what happens. If I'm 4/0 top lane and we lose the game, I recognize that I should've stopped trying to be the badass top lane zoner and rotated mid with my jungle for a gank and a tower, or warded the enemy red/blue and tried to make a play on it. If I'm jungling and my lane dies before I get there, I consider that maybe I could've seen the enemy lane pressuring hard and made my way there faster to turn the fight.

Honestly, playing support opened my eyes more than anything, because while you're playing support you're pretty much constantly thinking about what's best for your team instead of yourself. I win most of the games I support because I'm always thinking about where vision helps my team most, controlling dragon, rotating mid for a tower, which objective is most important at this point of the game, etc. I just looked up my ranked stats with supports for the past couple months since I started volunteering for it more, and it's pretty clear it's a big reason I'm pushing to gold.

Leona: 3-0
Sona: 2-0
Nami: 6-2
Thresh: 2-1

It's probably not a surprise that jungle is my 2nd most effective role in ranked in terms of win%, because I treat my jungle the same way as support in terms of always thinking about the next objective.

In fact, I can't think of a comparable game genre, where your 'perforamce' is based 1/5 on your own skill and the rest of it is trying to cobble together a victory from whatever garbage the matchmaker throws at you.

Kinda like a roguelike I guess?

Physical sports. LoL is almost identical to 5 on 5 pickup basketball games in this way.

People who use the "I'm only 1/5th of the team" argument are forgetting one very important thing. You will only have a ~50% win/loss over the long term if you are where you belong.

There's a reason diamond players get their smurfs to diamond in 50 games. Because even against like gold players, those players could play almost any champ and get 20 kills and single handedly carry the game.

If you go on a stretch of a bad 10 games because you had afks, people feeding uncontrollably on your team or whatever, that's fine. But just track your personal performance in 100+ games, and you'll find that if you are not above where you started at the beginning of that 100 games, it's because YOU earned it.

I can speak from experience on this. I have about 500 ranked games in season 3, and the highest i've been is Silver 1. Right now I'm Silver 1 like 80 LP, though I haven't played ranked in about a week and a half. The thing is, the only thing keeping me in silver all this time is me. My most played champ this season only has 21 games played, and I have a losing record with him. Basically, I've not done the things that are necessary to climb faster.

However, over the past couple months I have improved my mechanics, my awareness, and probably most importantly, my attitude. The only reason I'm potentially going to get my gold promo this month is that I treat EVERY game a 100% my responsibility, no matter what happens. If I'm 4/0 top lane and we lose the game, I recognize that I should've stopped trying to be the badass top lane zoner and rotated mid with my jungle for a gank and a tower, or warded the enemy red/blue and tried to make a play on it. If I'm jungling and my lane dies before I get there, I consider that maybe I could've saw the enemy lane pressuring hard and made my way there faster to turn the fight.

Honestly, playing support opened my eyes more than anything, because while you're playing support you're pretty much constantly thinking about what's best for your team instead of yourself. I win most of the games I support because I'm always thinking about where vision helps my team most, controlling dragon, rotating mid for a tower, which objective is most important at this point of the game, etc. I just looked up my ranked stats with supports for the past couple months since I started volunteering for it more, and it's pretty clear it's a big reason I'm pushing to gold.

Leona: 3-0
Sona: 2-0
Nami: 6-2
Thresh: 2-1

It's probably not a surprise that jungle is my 2nd most effective role in ranked in terms of win%, because I treat my jungle the same way as support in terms of always thinking about the next objective.

I'm having a similar experience playing Nami, it's almost like I can guarantee a win if I pick support and just start talking strategy with the ADC.

So you want to eat a cake, right, but you only have eggs. So you have to find four other people who have milk, sugar, a blender, and chocolate. But you show up, and the blender guy throws his blender to the ground and screams EGGS OR I FEED, and then the other three people start yelling at you to give up your eggs. Then you have to piece together the broken blender, and it's not really working properly, but you found some tape so it's working. Except the beaters are kind of wibbly wobbly now, so it isn't mixing the batter very well. The other four players start to scream at you for not blending the cake well enough, since that's your job, and then the milk guy has to go leave for 15 minutes because his mom just made dinner.

Are you understanding this so far? Ok good

So any ways once milk guy is back you have the cake, and its time to put it in the oven. The problem is that there are professional baking teams who just played a world baking tournament, so everyone wants to bake a cake like theirs. Even though your cake is chocolate, they want to cover it with icing meant for a vanilla cake, because that's what the Asian cake bakers do. You try to insist that your cake would be much better with chocolate icing, but they tell you to commit suicide. Finally, your shitty cake monstrosity comes out of the oven and it isnt even edible because of the whole process, and apparently cakes need more ingredients than just eggs and milk and chocolate.

Then you go into the post cake lobby and everyone unaminously agrees its your fault

Then you immediately hit the 'bake again' button and pray that this time you can just ADD THE GOD DAMN EGGS

So you want to eat a cake, right, but you only have eggs. So you have to find four other people who have milk, sugar, a blender, and chocolate. But you show up, and the blender guy throws his blender to the ground and screams EGGS OR I FEED, and then the other three people start yelling at you to give up your eggs. Then you have to piece together the broken blender, and it's not really working properly, but you found some tape so it's working. Except the beaters are kind of wibbly wobbly now, so it isn't mixing the batter very well. The other four players start to scream at you for not blending the cake well enough, since that's your job, and then the milk guy has to go leave for 15 minutes because his mom just made dinner.

Are you understanding this so far? Ok good

So any ways once milk guy is back you have the cake, and its time to put it in the oven. The problem is that there are professional baking teams who just played a world baking tournament, so everyone wants to bake a cake like theirs. Even though your cake is chocolate, they want to cover it with icing meant for a vanilla cake, because that's what the Asian cake bakers do. You try to insist that your cake would be much better with chocolate icing, but they tell you to commit suicide. Finally, your shitty cake monstrosity comes out of the oven and it isnt even edible because of the whole process, and apparently cakes need more ingredients than just eggs and milk and chocolate.

Then you go into the post cake lobby and everyone unaminously agrees its your fault

Then you immediately hit the 'bake again' button and pray that this time you can just ADD THE GOD DAMN EGGS

So I am doing my placement games right now (3-4)and I feel I am personally doing fairly well at my skill level (assuming low silver/high bronze) link http://www.lolking.net/summoner/na/203477#history. I am finding that my KDA and laneing phases go great usually well ahead or even but out of my four losses 2 of them have been because I haven't been able to use my large advantage to win the game. Any tips on closing out games?

Those Vi item builds are a bit weird. Mainly the BORK. With Vi you pretty much just stack health and annoy people. Good items include: Spirit of the Golem, Randiuns, spirit visage, frozen mallet, banshee's veil. Pretty much if it has HP and tank stats grab it. BORK really won't do much for you, especially considering it's cost coming out of the jungle.

As for closing out games: Go HAM, push towers above anything else and try to make sure you notice team mates stepping out of position and are ready to help them when they get jumped on.

Those Vi item builds are a bit weird. Mainly the BORK. With Vi you pretty much just stack health and annoy people. Good items include: Spirit of the Golem, Randiuns, spirit visage, frozen mallet, banshee's veil. Pretty much if it has HP and tank stats grab it. BORK really won't do much for you, especially considering it's cost coming out of the jungle.

As for closing out games: Go HAM, push towers above anything else and try to make sure you notice team mates stepping out of position and are ready to help them when they get jumped on.

Ya I was real fed in that game to start was like 5-0-5 at one point got the BORK to deal with Singed as my team was unable to stop him late game and he was just harming us everywhere. Maybe I should have gone my usual BC like I usually do?

So I am doing my placement games right now (3-4)and I feel I am personally doing fairly well at my skill level (assuming low silver/high bronze) link http://www.lolking.net/summoner/na/203477#history. I am finding that my KDA and laneing phases go great usually well ahead or even but out of my four losses 2 of them have been because I haven't been able to use my large advantage to win the game. Any tips on closing out games?

Rally your team around you. Roaming to other lanes and getting kills is great, but always try to take an objective off those skills. Keep dragon timers like crazy, shove towers hard, etc. Unfortunately sometimes you'll just be trying to herd cats, but a lot of people are receptive to being led

Only he is right, you are 1 person of 5, and this romantic notion that if you are a good player you can win despite there being 4 totally ineffectual people in your team is absurd.

Individual matches are totally different to statistics. Statistically if your performance is consistently good your chance to win matches goes up and so does your MMR. But on individual cases welp, you are pretty much at the mercy of the matchmaker unless you are WAY WAY better than your opponent.

The corollary to this is that the closer your performance is to your current ranking, the more matches you will need to stabilize on your performance level. Or in plain English, unless you are secretly diamond it takes a shit ton of matches for your performance to make a difference.

The obvious answer here is to ask yourself why you aren't diamond. If you were diamond and you could carry these games, perhaps a more useful exercise than cursing the matchmaker would be to assess the areas of your game that you can improve upon so that you can carry as though you were diamond.

I think someone said the best advice I ever took while playing LoL to improve. I think Zekent was the first time I heard it and he is awesome.

"The best thing you can do there is laugh."

Because 9 times out of 10, anything else will just make things worse.

It's a game, it should be fun, and I do a lot better when I just play for fun. I still want to win, don't get me wrong, but I 100% do my best to enjoy it as well. Which a lot of times includes going over /all chat and joking with the other team. Honestly most people in league aren't assholes.

Only he is right, you are 1 person of 5, and this romantic notion that if you are a good player you can win despite there being 4 totally ineffectual people in your team is absurd.

Individual matches are totally different to statistics. Statistically if your performance is consistently good your chance to win matches goes up and so does your MMR. But on individual cases welp, you are pretty much at the mercy of the matchmaker unless you are WAY WAY better than your opponent.

The corollary to this is that the closer your performance is to your current ranking, the more matches you will need to stabilize on your performance level. Or in plain English, unless you are secretly diamond it takes a shit ton of matches for your performance to make a difference.

It's like poker. If youre a good player despite the hands you get dealt you still consistently play better than your opponents.

Individual skill means more than just the cards youre dealt (teammates) it means leveraging your advantages and enforcing their errors.

So no it's not absurd. Your opponents are in the same boat as you. Find a weakness and exploit it.

That analogy does not work, if you get bad cards in poker you can bluff. If you are behind in LoL you can "bluff" warding a lot and using intelligent and coordinated strategies...which does not work if one of your cards throws a hissy fit and afk's at fountain and other card keeps getting caught even when, thanks to your warding, it knows exactly where the enemy cards are because cards don't understand the concept of good, society, love or mini map.

It's much harder to bluff in this game (showing strength when you're actually weak), but you can absolutely set traps the same way you would in poker, by feigning weakness when you're actually strong.

Those Vi item builds are a bit weird. Mainly the BORK. With Vi you pretty much just stack health and annoy people. Good items include: Spirit of the Golem, Randiuns, spirit visage, frozen mallet, banshee's veil. Pretty much if it has HP and tank stats grab it. BORK really won't do much for you, especially considering it's cost coming out of the jungle.

As for closing out games: Go HAM, push towers above anything else and try to make sure you notice team mates stepping out of position and are ready to help them when they get jumped on.

Ya I was real fed in that game to start was like 5-0-5 at one point got the BORK to deal with Singed as my team was unable to stop him late game and he was just harming us everywhere. Maybe I should have gone my usual BC like I usually do?

Bork is fine on Vi, it works great with her w. My prefered build on her is: Golem spirit, Cutlass, Locket/Randuin's/, SV, finish Bork when you can.

Cleaver vs Bork: Both work, you have to judge their team. If you're punching people for extended periods of time, get Bork. If you're bursting someone and then just want to fat around and help team, get cleaver.